Rhe306 – Fall 2013
MODEL INTRODUCTIONS: Academic Writing
COMPUTER SCIENCE:
The high performance achieved by part-of-speech (POS) taggers trained on plentiful
amounts of labeled word tokens is a success story of computational linguistics (Manning,
2011). However, research on learning taggers using type supervision (e.g. tag dictionaries or
morphological transducers) has had a more checkered history. The setting is a seductive one:
by labeling the possible parts-ofspeech for high frequency words, one might learn accurate
taggers by incorporating the type information as constraints to a semi-supervised generative
learning model like a hidden Markov model (HMM). Early work showed much promise for
this strategy (Kupiec, 1992; Merialdo, 1994), but successive efforts in recent years have
continued to peel away and address layers of unrealistic assumptions about the size,
coverage, and quality of the tag dictionaries that had been used (Toutanova and Johnson,
2008; Ravi and Knight, 2009; Hasan and Ng, 2009; Garrette and Baldridge, 2012). This
paper attempts to strip away further layers so we can build better intuitions about the
effectiveness of type-supervised and token-supervised strategies in a realistic setting of POStagging for low-resource languages.11(
ANTHROPOLOGY:
Anthropological studies of gender address gender roles, gender ideologies, and gender
identities in human social life. Gender roles consist of the economic, political, and cultural
activities of men and women as well as their status within society. Gender ideologies include
the expectations, associations, and sentiments attached to gender categories. Gender
identities refer to any individual’s affiliation with a gender category and his or her feelings
about that identity. Gender studies have three goals: (1) to describe the variation in gender
roles, ideologies, and identities from one society to the next; (2) to define the child-rearing
practices and forms of symbolic action by which gender roles, ideologies, and identities are
produced; and (3) to examine the interaction of gender with other economic, political, and
cultural processes (Conkey and Spector 1984; Conkey and Gero 1991).1
LITERATURE: (And why it is the best)
Imagine photographs on a black cardboard support (Figs 1–14): human sacrifice depicted in
post-Conquest Mexican codices; a feather mosaic of St Gregory’s mass after a German print;
early modern engravings of Spanish colonial atrocities; a seventeenth-century English
woodblock reproduction of Monteczuma in his palace; an Assyrian relief; and a Carolingian
illumination. The layout is familiar. Violent disaggregation was an effect of Aby Warburg’s
Mnemosyne Atlas of the 1920s as much as it was a strategy of the European avant-garde in
the journals of the 1930s. And so was identifying modernity through the return to an extinct
pre-modern image world. Warburg and Georges Bataille are strange modern bedfellows who
dream of the primitives.
Rhe306 – Fall 2013
MODEL INTRODUCTIONS: JOURNALISM
I wrote a thing last fall about massive open online courses (MOOCs, in the parlance), and
the challenge that free or cheap online classes pose to business as usual in higher ed. In that
piece, I compared the people running colleges today to music industry executives in the age
of Napster. (This was not a flattering comparison.) Aaron Bady, a cultural critic and doctoral
candidate at Berkeley, objected. I replied to Bady, one thing led to another, the slippery slope
was slupped, and Maria Bustillos ended up refereeing the whole thing here on The Awl.
- Clay Shirky, “Your Massively Open Offline College is Broken”
The Awl: http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/how-to-save-college
Every so often Al Frances says something that seems to surprise even him. Just now, for
instance, in the predawn darkness of his comfortable, rambling home in Carmel, California,
he has broken off his exercise routine to declare that “there is no definition of a mental
disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Then an odd, reflective look crosses
his face, as if he’s taking in the strangeness of this scene: Allen Frances, lead editor of the
fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’sDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV), the guy who wrote the book on mental
illness, confessing that “these concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright
lines at the boundaries.” For the first time in two days, the conversation comes to an
awkward halt.
Gary Greenberg, Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness
Wired: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/
Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last
few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the
young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring
spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re okay.
The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the
impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. […] Anyway, that’s
one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV – and the truth is that TV
tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.
David Foster Wallace, Federer as Religious Experience
Nytimes.com. August 20, 2008
It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this
very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only
the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a
little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you asked me if I
wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it
proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make
an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.
Zadie Smith, Joy
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/joy/?pagination=false